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Strategies & Examples

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Co-Teaching in an Age of Remote Learning

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During the next few months, most educators will try remote learning to meet the needs of their students. While virtual co-teaching might be new to you, with a bit of practice and creativity, you can reap many of the same benefits you have already found from co-teaching. Here are a few tips that migh…

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Opinion

7 steps for keeping prospective teachers in the fold, remotely

If you welcomed a student-teacher into your classroom in January, you might now be questioning how to include her as you work to meet the basic instructional needs of your students. You're probably feeling overwhelmed by the rapidly changing school policies on distance learning while navigating mounting pressures to troubleshoot new technologies like videoconferencing software. If that wasn't enough, those pressures may be compounded for you as a parent or caregiver who is also tending to the learning needs of your own children.

Many educators take on student-teachers because they intuitively understand the value of their unique role in preparing new talent for the field. Research shows that beginning teachers who complete student-teaching and receive high-quality mentoring are twice as likely to remain in the profession. Odds are you began your career as a student-teacher who was mentored through your first lessons and interactions with students. Given the chance to pay it forward, you became a mentor teacher to share your guidance, wisdom, and influence. In doing so, you opened your classroom at a time when fewer college graduates are choosing teaching careers than at any time in recent history.

As a consequence of social-isolation measures in response to COVID-19, decisions about school closures, distance learning, and student-teaching have been made by a patchwork of federal, state, regional, and district leaders. School closures have sidelined many promising student-teachers, leaving mentor teachers to figure out distance learning on their own. Although these policy decisions might be causing you some ambivalence about how to proceed with your student-teacher, you might be his only lifeline as the details of social isolation get sorted out. Rather than putting them off, bring student-teachers back into the fold.

Here's what you can do:

1. Empathize with your student-teachers. They also lost your classroom community and connections to your students. They also feel the pain, distance, and concerns about students and parents or caregivers who have been unreachable during this crisis. You are the conduit to your classroom through which they can reconnect with your students. Encourage them to partner with you to improve learning opportunities during this extraordinary situation.

2. Recognize that your student-teacher may be better equipped to teach online than you. Most student-teachers have engaged in a wide range of digital-learning tasks, facilitated collaborative teamwork online, and used videoconferencing software. Leverage that experience. Invite them to co-plan digital-learning tasks and online lessons. Make them a co-host of virtual meetings and give them opportunities to lead. If you cannot give them access to closed learning platforms, include them in planning learning tasks that you post and share student work to involve them in grading.

3. Include your student-teacher in establishing new routines and norms for your students' learning. Brainstorm new ideas with your student-teacher and be open to unfamiliar approaches. Your lack of exposure with a learning application or new platform might be an opportunity to leverage your student-teacher's experience. Before shutting down an idea, allow the prospective teacher time to work through it, develop it further based off constructive feedback, and-if that specific idea proves infeasible-offer new ones.

4. Delegate responsibilities and partner with your student-teacher to keep in closer contact with your most vulnerable students. Your students who already have a history of anxiety, depression, learning and attention disorders, food or housing insecurity, or other health-related conditions are at greater risk during this crisis. Partner with your student-teacher to stay in regular touch with these students.

5. Work in tandem with your student-teacher to maintain online-engagement norms. You, your student-teacher, and your students are now looking into each other's homes, so it is imperative that all parties be respectful of everyone's privacy beyond what current school policies or laws require. Review this resource from the Consortium for School Networking on Video Conferencing Privacy Considerations with your student-teacher. Anticipate the likelihood that racial, cultural, linguistic, gender, sexual orientation, and economic biases might be explicitly or implicitly communicated during a videoconference meeting with your students. Be prepared to involve your student-teacher in addressing those biases in an effort to build greater transparency, trust, and safety throughout your school community.

6. Involve your student-teacher in addressing disruptive incidents and explicit acts of racism. While it's unlikely you'll experience "Zoombombing," you have probably read about it or your district has informed you on how to change your Zoom settings. If you want to learn more, read this article from the Anti-Defamation League on "How to Prevent Zoombombing" and report any such incident to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center. You can involve your student-teacher in addressing these disruptive incidents-most of which have been explicit acts of racism that are most traumatizing to marginalized students-should they occur. Racial issues don't take a backseat to a global pandemic; they are only magnified by systemic inequities that this crisis is making worse and by racist incidents like Zoombombing.

7. Practice self-kindness in order to take better care of yourself and to model those efforts for your student-teacher. Reflect on the issues you can and cannot control. Share these reflections with your student-teacher. Take time with him or her to review social-emotional learning resources that have become available online in the wake of this crisis. "A Trauma-Informed Approach to Teaching Through Coronavirus" from Teaching Tolerance is a good place to start. This can unify your efforts with those of your student-teacher so that together you better respond to your students' social-emotional-learning needs.

One month from now, you might find yourself looking back, either wondering how your student-teacher could have been more involved or realizing how valuable he or she has been in supporting your students' learning through this crisis.

Now is the time. Reach out. Get your student-teacher on the phone. Make a plan to strengthen learning opportunities together for everyone's sake.

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What Happens to Student-Teachers Now? A Guide for Teachers

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Opinion If you welcomed a student-teacher into your classroom in January, you might now be questioning how to include her as you work to meet the basic instructional needs of your students. You're probably feeling overwhelmed by the rapidly changing school policies on distance learning while navigating mounting pressures to troubleshoot new technologies like videoconferencing software.

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A middle school English and special education teacher share how they meet the needs of all of their students-and the new practices they'll bring back to the classroom.

Every student has needs, but they don't all have the same needs. In the English 7 classes we co-teach, for example, more than 60 percent of the students have identified special needs, and many of our students are English learners. And although our Title 1 school is able to provide an iPad for each student, given the level of poverty in the neighborhood we cannot assume that every student has internet connectivity. That's a lot of different needs, especially when you take into account that our classes have up to 38 students.

We already faced a variety of challenges, but when our classes went digital almost overnight, we experienced a new layer of difficulty. As we have all year, we brainstormed, researched, and tried many approaches, all in the spirit of letting no one fail. We found four successful strategies that have kept our co-taught students thriving.

1. Address Reading Access Needs

Many of our students are able to think and talk about grade-level ideas but are not yet able to read grade-level texts. We were able to address this in the classroom by forming small groups to read texts aloud, providing the class novel as an audiobook, and modeling fluent reading. With the shift to distance learning, however, we had to find ways to replace the in-person supports.

One approach we've used has been to record ourselves reading all texts and provide that audio support embedded in all assignments. We are also providing leveled texts for each student's reading ability, made possible by article sources like Newsela. We're also taking advantage of our learning management system, as Google Classroom allows teachers to assign differentiated documents easily-we have students grouped in reading level bands, and we assign leveled texts or assignments that have been modified to suit each group.

2. Address Writing Needs

During in-person teaching, we were able to model both planning and writing techniques. We were able to give students real-time feedback on their writing in class, as well as provide visual supports like sentence frames and word banks.

We shifted our approach for distance learning to include more mentor texts than we used to use in the classroom, and screencasts of us modeling the writing techniques. Josh was already familiar with making screencasts, but Sarah had to learn on the fly. Students can access these videos at any time via hyperlinks in their assignments. We're also still able to provide sentence frames and word banks, although the resources that used to be very accessible as visuals on our classroom walls are now digital, and students need to switch between apps to access them-they can watch a video on Google, but they complete their writing in a separate app called Notability.

To replace real-time feedback, we have been adding comments on their Google documents and providing scores using an electronic rubric. We've also live co-taught editing and revising via Google Meets, using a sample text that mirrored the most common mistakes we found in their writing.

3. Use Accommodations That Translate Easily to Distance Learning

When we were at school, students with special needs received accommodations related to their learning challenges that helped them access general education lessons. Some of these accommodations have translated easily to distance learning-extra time and modified work are two examples of that. But we've had to give up in-the-moment feedback about writing and the ability to clarify misunderstandings in real time as students now work asynchronously.

Other accommodations that are still easy to provide include opportunities to redo and resubmit work, as well as the ability to use the speech-to-text supports that are available on student iPads and smartphones.

We were pleased to realize the power of using our own video lessons for all students, but especially for those who need multiple exposures to content or longer think time to process ideas. Now we plan to continue providing students with recorded lessons for home access when we return to our physical school.

4. Use Parallel Workload Management Strategies

The two of us share equally in grading and student support, just as we did in pre-Covid teaching. When it comes to planning, we split the work in line with our specialties: Josh is the content expert, ensuring that lessons are robust and aligned with Common Core State Standards, and Sarah is the access expert, providing accommodations and modifications to support student needs and adhere to individualized education programs.

During our daily office hours, students reach out to each of us through email-sometimes to Sarah, sometimes to Josh-and we know that we'll respond similarly since we're on the same page.

Distance learning is challenging for all students, but even more so for students who need accommodations. Some days are really tough, for us and for our students. The bright side has been that many of our students who present the most challenges are not struggling as much as we might have predicted. Instead, many of them are advocating for themselves and finding a new level of self-awareness that they did not possess in the classroom.

The challenge of distance learning has shifted our perspectives as we have worked to devise new ways to meet students' needs, and these ways will transfer to in-person teaching when we go back to our classroom.

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A middle school English and special education teacher share how they meet the needs of all of their students-and the new practices they'll bring back to the classroom. Every student has needs, but they don't all have the same needs.

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Welcome TRRE Cohort 1_ Orientation Part I August 26th

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Orientation: Part I       Google Exit Form 

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Orientation: Part I       Google Exit Form 

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Please complete the following questions to help use prepare for our next steps.

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Orientation: Part II      Google Exit Form

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Orientation: Part II      Google Exit Form

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Mentor/Resident Teaching Schedule - TRRE Cohort 1

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To help us better plan for the upcoming residency events, please let us know what your teaching schedule is for this academic year. In the questions below, please share the following information: - the name of the courses you will be teaching each period - your prep and lunch periods…

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Just for fun, try this!

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Perspectives in Co-Teaching...

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November - Mentor Session Box link Items & Padlet

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November - Mentor Session Box link Items & Padlet

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November - Mentor Session (Google Form) - please complete by November 30th.

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November - Mentor Session (Google Form) - please complete by November 30th.

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Domain 2: The Classroom Environment

Please discuss with your residents a day and time you will formally observe them during classroom activities. During the observation, please collect details notes about what you see and hear. Remember, this observation is a "snap shot" of the resident's current performance, therefore observations made outside of this time frame should not be used as evidence.

At the completion of the observation, please set up a time to debrief and discuss the findings with your resident. This is a great time to identify the residents' strengths and areas for growth. During this time, please assist your resident in identifying specific goals they will focus on for the next few weeks.

This observation of your Resident Teacher focuses on 2 components of the Danielson Framework. These include:

2a: Creating an environment of respect and rapport
2c: Managing class procedures
2d: Managing student behavior

Please complete a classroom observation of your resident teacher based on a specific lesson you observe by November 30th, 2020. This will ensure that we have data points to analyze prior to the end of the semester.

For more specific information about the attributes and examples of each component listed below, please refer to "The Framework For Teaching Evaluation Instrument" which can be located at this link listed below.

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TRRE Mentor Resident Observation - Nov2020

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Domain 2: The Classroom Environment Please discuss with your residents a day and time you will formally observe them during classroom activities. During the observation, please collect details notes about what you see and hear. Remember, this observation is a "snap shot" of the resident's current performance, therefore observations made outside of this time frame should not be used as evidence.